People can’t get enough of scandal, especially when it comes with a title attached. And everyone in Nicholas Wright’s acerbic, hugely enjoyable new play is a posho or wants to be, from the titular Duchess herself, Wallace Simpson, to writer Lady Caroline Blackwood, whose failure to secure a Sunday Times interview with the frail, widowed Wallace in 1980 prompted her book, on which Wright’s play is based.
Wallace haunts proceedings like the wasp-waisted, vodka-nipping cipher of popular mythology, but she hardly enters her own Bois du Boulogne drawing room here, being bedridden and hidden from the world by her formidable French lawyer.
Instead, Wright’s play is a duel between two equally monstrous women who feel equally entitled to Wallace’s story: her vain, controlling Parisienne gatekeeper, ‘Maitre’ Blum (Sheila Hancock); and the ruthless, recently-widowed Blackwood (Anna Chancellor).
Richard Eyre’s gorgeous, gilt-edged production looks like West End transfer material, not least because of its top-notch cast. Chancellor is a fine, louche Lady Caroline, compulsively searching for a ‘truth’ that she may have invented and sinking herself into hack journalism and the vodka bottle she keeps in her vast handbag.
Hancock’s enigmatic Maitre Blum replaces Wallace as her target. What exactly is her relationship to her client? Love, as she claims, or, as Caroline suspects, the ‘most unbelievable cruelty’?
Love and cruelty unite in exactly the kind of prurient interest that Wright’s play is smart enough to trade on and to expose. When Lady Caroline reminisces about being painted in a Paris garrett by her then-husband Lucian Freud; or when Angela Thorne appears as Lady Diana Mosley – a deaf old dear whose politics are as odious as she is lovely – it is gossip at its poshest: bohemian, titled, with art at its elbow.
Blum’s backstory as a displaced Jew, plus the casual fascism of some British aristos, sketches a dark European setting for these glittering personalities. And John Heffernan shines as a young biographer, a Brideshead-wannabe who adores the women he coyly reproves. His integrity makes you wish that everyone who writes from life would bring
a conscience as well as a dagger.